Semantic Graphs and Conversational Agents

ABSTRACT

Semantic clustering techniques are described. In various implementations, a conversational agent is configured to perform semantic clustering of a corpus of user utterances. Semantic clustering may be used to provide a variety of functionality, such as to group a corpus of utterances into semantic clusters in which each cluster pertains to a similar topic. These clusters may then be leveraged to identify topics and assess their relative importance, as for example to prioritize topics whose handling by the conversation agent should be improved. A variety of utterances may be processed using these techniques, such as spoken words, textual descriptions entered via live chat, instant messaging, a website interface, email, SMS, a social network, a blogging or micro-blogging interface, and so on.

RELATED APPLICATION(S)

This application is a continuation of U.S. application Ser. No.12/748,133, filed Mar. 26, 2010. The entire teachings of the aboveapplication(s) are incorporated herein by reference.

BACKGROUND

Companies continue to develop an ever increasing variety of techniquesto interact with customers. For example, a company may provide a websitethat includes details about products and/or services of the company.Additionally, the website may include support information, orfunctionality to purchase products and services from the company. Acustomer, for instance, may interact with the website to findinformation about a prospective purchase and later, after the purchase,to find information regarding use of the purchase. Consequently, theamount of information that is made available via these techniques isever-increasing, which may make it difficult for customers to locatedesired information using traditional techniques.

One such traditional technique that has been employed by the companiesinvolves the use of search technologies. For example, the company mayinclude search technologies on a website to allow customers to hunt foranswers to their questions. This may work well for certain types ofqueries and issues, but may fail as questions become increasinglycomplex, as issue resolution may require personalized information, andso on. As a result, users may “walk away” from the website frustrated,may make a time-consuming call to a human customer servicerepresentative (CSR), and so on. Therefore, traditional searchtechniques may have a negative impact on user experience with thewebsite and consequently on the user's view of the company as a whole.

SUMMARY

Semantic clustering techniques are described. In variousimplementations, a conversational agent is configured to accept naturallanguage input from a user (“utterances”) and then perform deeplinguistic analysis of these utterances. Semantic clustering may beapplied to the output of such analysis to provide a variety offunctionalities, such as grouping a corpus of utterances into semanticclusters in which each cluster pertains to a similar topic. Thesesemantic clusters may then be leveraged to identify topics and assesstheir relative importance in order to, for example, prioritize topicsthat occur frequently or topics whose handling by the conversationalagent should be improved. A variety of utterances may be processed usingthese techniques, such as spoken words or textual descriptions enteredvia instant messaging, a website interface, SMS, email, a socialnetworking, blogging or micro-blogging service, and so on.

This Summary is provided to introduce a selection of concepts in asimplified form that are further described below in the DetailedDescription. This Summary is not intended to identify key features oressential features of the claimed subject matter, nor is it intended tobe used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subjectmatter.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

The detailed description is described with reference to the accompanyingfigures. In the figures, the left-most digit(s) of a reference numberidentifies the figure in which the reference number first appears. Theuse of the same reference numbers in different instances in thedescription and the figures may indicate similar or identical items.

FIG. 1 is an illustration of an environment in an example implementationthat is operable to perform semantic clustering techniques for aconversational agent.

FIG. 2 illustrates an example implementation of a procedure to match auser utterance to likely user intents.

FIG. 3 is an illustration of an example semantic graph that is generatedby a conversational agent of FIG. 1 for a user utterance.

FIG. 4 depicts an example implementation of a system for performinglinguistic analysis of a user utterance.

FIG. 5 depicts an example implementation of an ontology using alanguage-independent hierarchy.

FIG. 6 depicts an example implementation of a semantic graph patternthat includes graph fragments.

FIG. 7 is an illustration of an example implementation showing examplesof semantic graphs corresponding to utterances that match the twofragment graphs making up the graph pattern of FIG. 6.

FIG. 8 is an illustration of an example implementation of subsuminggraphs.

FIG. 9 illustrates an example of visualization of a matching percentileof a pattern using a meter.

FIG. 10 illustrates an example implementation of information output viaa user interface for review by a reviewer.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION Overview

Users may have access to an ever-increasing variety of information froman ever-increasing variety of sources, such as via a website, mobilecommunications device, email, instant messaging, and so on.Consequently, it has become increasingly difficult for a user to locatedesired information from within this variety of information, which maylead to user frustration with the traditional techniques used to accessthe information as well as the provider of the information, e.g., thecompany itself.

Conversational agent techniques are described, which include semanticclustering and other functionalities that are described in the followingsections. In various implementations, conversational agents areimplemented using one or more modules to engage in an interactivenatural language dialog with a user via a textual chat. Thus, use ofconversational agents may provide automated assistance to users to helpthem resolve issues without directly interacting with a human agent(e.g., a customer support representative in a call center). This mayhelp a company to efficiently utilize resources and provide additionalfunctionality to a user that was not available via traditional searchtechniques. The textual chat may be inputted using a variety ofmechanisms, such as transcripts of spoken words (such as telephonecalls), text inputs (e.g., instant messages, live chat, email, SMS,blogging and micro-blogging services, and so on), automatic speechrecognition, and so forth.

Through use of linguistic analysis techniques, the conversational agentmay map user inputs (henceforth called “utterances”) to semanticrepresentations. Such representations may be graphs, the nodes of whichrepresent concepts and the edges of which represent semantic roles. Suchgraphs will henceforth be called “semantic graphs”.

The conversational agent may represent a user intent by an intent graphpattern or a plurality of intent graph patterns. Thus, a user utterancemay be formed into a semantic graph and compared with intent graphpatterns (henceforth called “graph patterns”). If there is a match thenthe utterance likely involves the intent represented by the graphpattern or plurality of graph patterns.

Semantic graphs representing utterances may be grouped into semanticclusters using various techniques referred to as semantic clusteringtechniques. Each of the semantic clusters may pertain to a similartopic. These semantic clusters can then be leveraged to determinedominant or active topics in a corpus of utterances for a variety ofpurposes. For example, semantic clusters may be used to improve thequality of a conversational agent. Further discussion of semanticclustering techniques and conversational agents may be found in relationto the following sections.

In the following discussion, an example environment is described alongwith example procedures that may be implemented in the exampleenvironment as well as in other environments. Accordingly, the exampleprocedures are not limited to implementation in the example environmentsand the example environments are not limited to implementation of theexample procedures.

Example Environment

FIG. 1 illustrates an example environment 100 that is operable to employsemantic clustering techniques for a conversational agent. Theillustrated environment 100 includes a service provider 102 having aconversational agent 104 that is accessible to a plurality of clientdevices 106, 108 over a network 110. The client devices 106, 108 may beconfigured in a variety of ways. For example, the client devices may beconfigured as a computing device that is capable of communicating overthe network, such as a desktop computer as illustrated by client device106, a mobile station, an entertainment appliance, a set-top boxcommunicatively coupled to a display device, a wireless phone asillustrated by client device 108, a game console, and so forth. Thus,the client devices may range from full resource devices with substantialmemory and processor resources (e.g., personal computers, game consoles)to a low-resource device with limited memory and/or processing resources(e.g., traditional set-top boxes, hand-held game consoles).

Likewise, the network 110 may assume a variety of configurations. Forexample, the network 110 may include a wide area network (WAN), a localarea network (LAN), a wireless network, a public telephone network, anintranet, a telephone network, and so on. Further, although a singlenetwork 110 is shown, the network 110 may be configured to includemultiple networks. For instance, the client device 106 configured as adesktop computer and the service provider 102 may be communicativelycoupled via the Internet and the client device 108 configured as awireless phone may be communicatively coupled to the service provider102 via a telephone network. A wide variety of other instances are alsocontemplated.

The service provider 102 is illustrated as being implemented by one ormore servers (or other computing devices) that are accessible to theclient devices 106, 108 via the network 110. Additionally, theconversational agent 104 is illustrated as a module that is implementedby the service provider 102. For example, the conversational agent 104may include a user experience 112 that is accessible via a webpageoutput by the service provider 102 to the client device 106 configuredas a desktop computer. In another example, the conversational agent 104may include a user experience 112 that is accessible via a spoken inputreceived by the client device 108 configured as a wireless phone. Thus,user experience of the conversational agent 104 may be accessed througha wide variety of techniques. A variety of other examples are alsocontemplated, such as instant messaging, email, user-generated contentin conjunction with a social network, blogging and micro-bloggingservices, and so on.

Generally, any of the functions described herein can be implementedusing software, firmware, hardware (e.g., fixed logic circuitry), manualprocessing, or a combination of these implementations. The terms“module” and “functionality” as used herein generally representsoftware, firmware, hardware, or a combination thereof. In the case of asoftware implementation, the module and/or functionality representsinstructions (e.g., program code) that perform specified tasks whenexecuted on a processing system that may include one or more processorsor other hardware. The program code can be stored in a wide variety oftypes and combinations of memory may be employed, such as random accessmemory (RAM), hard disk memory, removable medium memory, and other typesof computer-readable media. The features of the semantic clusteringtechniques described below are platform-independent, meaning that thetechniques may be implemented on a variety of commercial computingplatforms having a variety of processors.

The conversational agent 104 is configured to engage in an interactivenatural language dialog with a human user via textual chat, to completea specific task for or on behalf of that user. For example, text enteredby a user through interaction with the client device 106 configured as adesktop computer may be provided to the conversational agent 104. Inanother example, a voice input provided by the client device 108configured as a wireless phone may be converted to text and processed bythe conversational agent 104; the response of the conversational agent104 can then be converted back to speech before being sent to the clientdevice 108.

Tasks may include providing information to the user, answering theuser's questions, helping the user solve a problem (support agent),proposing new products and services to the user (sales and/or marketingagent), and so on.

The conversational agent 104 may embed complex logic flows to aidinteraction with the user using natural language. The conversationalagent 104 may also interact with various application programminginterfaces (APIs) and backend systems of a company that offers use ofthe agent, e.g., the service provider 102. For example, theconversational agent 104 may be offered as a visual avatar on a companyweb site (or a specific section of the site), but other interactionchannels such as instant messaging systems, mobile phones, email, socialnetworking sites, or blogging and micro-blogging services are alsocontemplated. The conversational agent 104 may respond to user questionsand also drive the conversation to solicit specific information tobetter understand the user's situation.

Example Conversation Strategy

Utterances that are received (e.g., spoken or typed by a user) areparsed by a linguistic analysis module 116 of the conversational agent104 and may be matched by a comparison module 118 against a number ofpossible intents that are part of one or more decision trees 120. Basedon the identified intent, the conversational agent 104 may then generatea reply. A conversation between the user and the agent may include oneor more of these interactions between the user and the conversationalagent 104.

A user's intent can be expressed in a variety of ways. For example, theuser's intent may be configured as a single information request, mayinclude a set of several potential information requests, and so on. Inthe latter case, the conversational agent 104 may ask for clarificationuntil a specific information request is identifiable and may besatisfied.

In one or more implementations, conversations are modeled as pathsthrough a set of decision trees 120, which may be configured ascircuit-like structures that describe possible conversation flows. Theroot of each decision tree 120 may describe an initial state, before auser intent has been identified. Leaves of the decision tree 120 may bethought of as answers to a specific request. Accordingly, a path fromthe root to a leaf of the decision tree 120 may represent a sequence ofutterances (e.g., speech acts) that may lead to identification of theinformation requested by the user and thus completion of theconversational agent's 104 task. In addition to a simple traversal ofthe decision tree 120, the conversational agent 120 may offerincreasingly complex dialog strategies that allow the user to switchbetween tasks (or decision trees) flexibly.

The set of intents that can be matched to user utterances at aparticular point in time relates to a current position of a conversationin the decision tree 120. For example, a customer of atelecommunications company might initiate a conversation by asking, “CanI access my voice mail from the web?” Upon recognizing the intent of thequestion, the conversational agent 104 moves from the decision tree's120 root node to one of the root's child nodes. Assuming that thecompany delivers phone services through a cellular network, landlines,and VoIP, the conversational agent 104 may consult the information thatis relevant to proceed in the decision tree 120 and respond with aclarifying question, e.g., “What type of phone service do you use foryour voice mail?”

Assuming the user answers with an utterance that includes sufficientinformation and is recognized by the agent, the conversational agent 104has identified the user's intent and moves to a leaf node, whichcontains an answer to the user's question. It should be noted that auser utterance such as “VOIP” may be associated with a different intentwhen produced at the beginning of the conversation, at the root of thedecision tree 120, as opposed to later in the conversation at the nodecorresponding to web access to voicemail.

In addition to the current position in the decision tree 120, theconversational agent 104 may have knowledge of pieces of informationthat were obtained earlier during the conversation. For example, thisadditional information may be represented as variable-value pairs, whichmay act to limit the user from asking a same question multiple times,asking for information that was already provided by user, and so on.Additionally, the conversational agent 104 may implement complex andsophisticated conversation strategies. For example, the conversationalagent 104 may proactively ask questions and volunteer related pieces ofinformation based on information known about the user from theconversation or other data collected about the user (e.g., via an APIprovided by the service provider 102 offering the conversational agent104).

Matching User Utterances to User Intents

FIG. 2 illustrates an example implementation 200 of a procedure to matcha user utterance to a likely intent. User utterance 202 is illustratedas being provided to the linguistic analysis module 116 via the userexperience 112. Upon receipt of the user utterance 202, the linguisticanalysis module 116 may form a semantic graph 204. The semantic graph204 may then be leveraged by the comparison module 118 to determine aclosest matching pattern through a decision tree 120 lookup, and fromthat, a user's intent 206. By using these techniques, the conversationalagent 104 is configured to deal with “messy” and “real” user utterances202. For example, the user utterance may contain a high percentage (over50%) of misspelled, ungrammatical or incomplete sentences,abbreviations, slang, and so on.

Parsing and Semantic Representations of Input Sentences

FIG. 3 is an illustration of an example semantic graph 300 that isgenerated by the conversational agent 104 of FIG. 1 for a userutterance. Text from a user's utterance (e.g., spoken, written, and soon) may be parsed into a semantic graph 300. The nodes of the semanticgraph 300 represent concepts; the directed edges are labeled withsemantic functions in the figure. Together, concepts related to nodesand semantic functions related to edges will be called semantic conceptsor traits (and may also be referred to as attributes, properties,features, and so on). For example, the sentence “I'd like to change myorder” may be parsed into the semantic graph 300 shown in FIG. 3.

The main trait of a node is the concept it represents. In animplementation, concept traits (e.g., “modify” in FIG. 3) are abstractedover lexical variations and spelling mistakes. For example, replacingthe word “change” by “alter,” “modify,” or even “moddify” (sic) in theuser input does not affect the structure of the semantic graph 300 shownin FIG. 3. Likewise, representing “my” and “I” by the conceptInterlocutor makes the interpretation of the semantic form insensitiveto the form used in the user utterance. For example, the utterance “Youwould like to modify your order” may be parsed by the linguisticanalysis module 116 to form the graph 300 shown in FIG. 3. Similarly,“We would like to change our order” may also be parsed by the linguisticanalysis module 116 into the graph 300 shown in FIG. 3.

In implementations, constructions such as “would like to” arerepresented by a modal trait on the modify node and not a concept trait.Additionally, this particular value may be present on one or more of theutterances “I′d like to”, “I want to”, “I wanna”, and so on. In thisway, a single representation may be provided for a variety of synonymousconstructions. On the other hand, use of a dedicated modal trait ratherthan creating a node with a “want-to” concept trait may help to simplifythe semantic graphs and thus facilitate pattern matching, furtherdiscussion of which may be found later in the “Pattern Matching” sectionof the description.

The graph edges that are drawn in FIG. 3 may be referred to as “functionedges” with the respective labels representing semantic roles. Forexample, in FIG. 3 Order is the theme of Modify, i.e., the object actedupon. In FIG. 3, this is denoted by the Theme label on the edges betweenthe two nodes, denoting the “theme” semantic role. The Theme label maystill fulfill this role even if the same relation were expressed in thepassive, e.g., “Has my order been modified?” where “order” is asyntactic subject. Thus, semantic abstraction may be used to provide astraightforward identification of common ideas in different utterances,which may increase the efficiency and accuracy of a pattern matchingprocess to be discussed later.

In the semantic graph 300, function edges and their incident nodes forma tree. In implementations, the root of the tree may be used as aplaceholder that does not represent a particular concept of theutterance. For example, the concept trait may be set to a value “Top,”which is representative of the most general concept.

It should be noted that parsing may focus on extracting dependenciesbetween words, which may then be mapped to dependencies betweenconcepts. This approach, known generically as a dependency grammar, doesnot make assumptions on phrase structure. Therefore, incompletesentences and ungrammatical sentences may be handled and mapped to asemantic graph, much in the way a human may extract meaning fromungrammatical or incomplete sentences. This approach allows aconversational agent to be robust and able to understand “real” userutterances, which are often grammatically incorrect, may contain typosand spelling mistakes, and may use slang words or phrases.

Example Linguistic Analysis

FIG. 4 depicts an example implementation of a system 400 for parsing (oranalyzing) a user utterance. The system 400 of FIG. 4 illustrates aconversational agent 104 as being portioned into a lexical module 402, asyntactic module 404, and a semantic module 406 which are representativeof functionality that may be employed at different levels in the parsingprocedure. At the lexical module 402 level, a user utterance 408 (e.g.,a sentence) is segmented into words and each word is matched againstentries in a lexicon 410 with the aid of a spell checker.

Because there may be a variety of spelling suggestions for a word, and alexical entry may include several words (for example “credit card” or“bill of sale”), the lexical module 402 of the conversational agent 104may map a word sequence of the user utterance 408 to one or more flexionsequences. A flexion is a lexical entry that includes a lemma (i.e., anuninflected form) and possibly grammatical marks, such as tense, number,person, mood, and so on. For example, the lemma “agent” may have theflexions that include “agent” and “agents.”

In an implementation, the lexicon 410 that is used to match words toflexions is language-dependent. Additionally, some of the entriescontained therein may be specific to a business area, a conversationalagent, and so on. For example, lexical entries may include names offorms specific to a business area or commercial names specific to theconversational agent 104. Accordingly, lexicon 410 lookup may befiltered by word spaces, where a word space characterizes aconversational agent or a business area.

At the syntactic module 404 level, information that is common to theflexions of a given lemma is stored in a dictionary 412. Thisinformation may include (1) construction information and (2) ontologyinformation. Ontology information pertains to the semantic level; andprovides the concept traits which are further mentioned in the “Parsingand semantic representations of input sentences” Section and FIG. 3.Construction information includes possible part-of-speech assignments toa lemma. For example, “format” may be assigned both verb and nounconstructions. Construction information may also include syntacticpatterns linking the dictionary item to other items. For example, theconstruction for “format” as a verb may show that the item relates to anoun with a subject link and to another noun with an object link.

A unification-based algorithm 414 may be employed to unify availableconstructions of the lemmata (i.e., a plurality of lemma) in a sequenceto yield one or more syntactic graphs. In addition to part-of-speechinformation, linearity information (e.g., in English, a tendency ofobjects to occur after verbs) and the confidence assigned to therecognition of particular constructions may be taken into account toscore the graphs.

At the semantic module 406 level, a highest-scoring syntactic graph ismapped to a semantic graph 416. As a result of this process, a semanticgraph 416 having increased abstraction is obtained in which nodesrepresent ontology concepts and edges represent logical relationsbetween the concepts.

Ontology may be represented as a language-independent concept hierarchy.This hierarchy may be represented using a directed graph with two typesof edges, “is-a-kind-of” and “subsumes.” In the example 500 shown inFIG. 5, for instance, a “password” is a kind of“certificate_or_credentials” and is a kind of “secret_or_arcanum”. Inturn, “secret_or_arcanum” also subsumes “esoterica” and “kabbalah”,while “certificate_or_credentials” subsumes “login_name”,“identity_card”, and “diploma”.

Representation of Intents by Graph Patterns

For illustration purposes, suppose the conversational agent 104 has beendesigned to help users change their password on the web site that embedsthe conversational agent's user experience 112. A user may express thisrequest in a variety of ways. Consider, for example, the userutterances: “How does one change one's password?”, “How to changepassword,” “How should I go about changing my password,” “Need to changemy password. How do I do that?”, and “Would you be so kind as to tell mehow to modify my password?” Each of these wordings contain the concepts“how” and “change password,” with substantial variation in the exact waythese two concepts are linked to each other, as well as in the use oromission of pronouns.

One way to capture an intent common to these utterances is through useof semantic representations that contain graph fragments. FIG. 6 depictsan example implementation 600 of a graph pattern 602 that includes graphfragments for (1) “change password” (with “password” functioning as thetheme of “change”); and (2) “how”. These fragments form a graph pattern(which, for purposes of the discussion that follows, may be simplyreferred to as a “pattern”). An utterance is considered as matching thispattern if each of the pattern fragments occurs in a semantic graph ofthe utterance. It should be noted that this is a condition that isconsidered sufficient for matching; further discussion of this and otherconditions may be found in relation to the following section.

For example, semantic graphs for “how to change password” and “need tochange my password. How do I do that?” both contain these fragments,examples of which are illustrated in the implementation 700 of FIG. 7.In this implementation 700, examples of semantic graphs that match thetwo graph fragments 602 of FIG. 6 are shown.

Trait Matching

Suppose the conversational agent 104 has been created to explain how tochange credentials (i.e., user ID and/or password) rather than apassword, specifically. Accordingly, a pattern may be defined to matchquestions about how to change one's password as well as a user ID orother credentials. This is an example of a situation in whichinformation to be provided by the conversational agent 104 may bedescribed by a general concept that subsumes a number of more specificconcepts that are likely to occur in user utterances. For example, theconversational agent 104 may deliver generic information aboutconnecting an Internet router, but requests for this information arelikely to mention specific router brands and models.

Concept subsumption may provide flexibility to the conversational agent104. In implementations, the conditions that are to be met for a matchto be considered between a semantic graph and a pattern are stated asfollows: A pattern matches a semantic graph if and only if a subgraph ofthe semantic graph subsumes the pattern. Continuing with the previousexample, a simple example of graph subsumption would be the semanticgraph for “change credentials” as subsuming the graph for “changepassword,” an example of which is shown in the implementation 800 ofFIG. 8.

In FIG. 8, given that ontology defines “password” as a child of“credentials” as previously discussed in relation to FIG. 4, Graph 1subsumes Graph 2 in this implementation 800. More generally, a graph g1subsumes a graph g2 if and only if g2 can be transformed into g1 by zeroor more applications of the following operations:

-   -   Delete a node and its incoming edge from g2;    -   Delete a trait from a g2 node; or.    -   Replace the value of a trait in g2 by another value that        subsumes it.

Trait subsumption has been illustrated in FIG. 8 for concept traits.However, it should be noted that trait subsumption may be defined on avariety of traits, including function labels on edges. Here are otherexamples:

-   -   The modal value “MAY or MUST” subsumes the value “MUST”.    -   The generic edge label “Attribute” subsumes each other edge        label (for example, “Agent,” “Theme,” “Location,” etc.).

Subsumption for modal values is based on sets of possible values. Eithera trait takes its value in a hierarchy (e.g., edge labels, ontologyconcepts) or in a collection of sets. For example, the modal value“MUST” is really a singleton set that includes a single instance of“MUST.”

Representation of an Intent by a Set of Graph Patterns

In addition to capturing stylistic variations on a question, matchingalso helps capture logically distinct but equivalent ways of expressingthe same intent. For example, a user might ask how she can change herpassword by typing, “How can I change my password?” or by typing, “Canyou help me change my password?” Therefore, a single intent is notusually captured by a single graph pattern. Accordingly, several graphpatterns may be used. This set of patterns forms a logical disjunction,meaning that, in order to match the intent, a user utterance matches atleast one of the patterns.

Matching Algorithm Example

A set of possible intents may be associated with each position in aconversational agent's 104 decision tree 120. This set is the union ofthe intents of the child nodes at that position in the decision tree120. Each of the possible intents at the current decision tree 120position is represented by a set of graph patterns. The set of patternscollectively representing each of the possible intents at a currentposition are referred to as the active patterns in the followingdiscussion.

Matching Algorithm Outline Example

Given an utterance and a current position in the conversational agent's104 decision tree 120, the conversational agent 104 may perform thefollowing steps to determine user intent:

-   -   1. Retrieve the active patterns at a current position.    -   2. Match each active pattern against the semantic graph of the        utterance.    -   3. Assign a matching distance to each successful match between        the semantic graph of the utterance and an active pattern.    -   4. Select the intent represented by the active pattern with the        smallest matching distance.

If no successful match can be found in step 2 above, we say that theutterance is unmatched. In such a case, the conversational agent may nothave the linguistic knowledge to assign an intent to this utterance.

Matching Distance

A number of metrics may be used to measure a distance between a graph ofan utterance and a matching graph pattern in the conversational agent'sknowledge. These metrics may combine one or more of the followingquantities algebraically:

-   -   1. The amount of information contained in matching pairs of        trait values.    -   2. The semantic distance between the trait values in a matching        pair.    -   3. The amount of information contained in sentence nodes and        edges outside the matching subgraph.

In implementations, a metric formula is used to compute a distance thatdecreases with quantity 1 and increases with quantities 2 and 3. Theseconstraints correspond to the semantic “closeness” of the semantic graphand the pattern it matches.

The amount of information in trait values may be measured in a number ofways:

-   -   In one such approach, a node's traits collectively count as a        constant (typically equal to 1). Therefore, quantity 1 does not        vary for a given pattern and quantity 3 is simply a number of        nodes that are not involved in the match.    -   Other such approaches may use a specificity metric. For example,        trait values may be considered to have increasing specificity as        the number of occurrences in utterances decreases. This may be        captured by computing an inverse of a proportion of utterances        containing a given trait value. This measure may also be        referred to as inverse frequency.

The matching distance between two trait values (quantity 2, henceforthcalled subsumption distance) may be computed as a function of:

-   -   Characteristics of a shortest path from one concept to another        in a concept hierarchy; and    -   Proper containment or equality for subset subsumption (as, for        example, with modal trait values).

In various implementations, the number of graph nodes is used as ameasure of information and the trait distance is proportional to thenumber of hierarchy levels linking two concepts or two edge labels.

Indirect Patterns

The conversational agent 104 may also leverage indirect patterns thatare assigned low confidence and may be used in cases when theconversational agent 104 is not “sure” of the user's intent. Exclusive,or direct, patterns may take precedence over non-exclusive, or indirect,patterns when identifying a user's intent by the conversational agent104. If the user's utterance does not match one or more direct patterns,each indirectly matching intent may be considered as potentiallyrelevant. The conversational agent 104 may then offer the user a list ofquestion rewordings or a list of potentially relevant topics orquestions. This may occur when a user has entered several keywords butnot a full sentence or phrase that more fully describes what is beingrequested.

For example, a user may type “cashback” which might mean “How doescashback work?” or “I never received my cash back.” A designer of theconversational agent 104 may address this situation in a variety ofways, examples of which include the following:

-   -   1. Define a “cashback” intent (with an associated direct        pattern) that elicits a question from the agent to determine        whether the user is attempting to solve an issue or is merely        inquiring about cashback.    -   2. Attach an indirect pattern for “cashback” to both intents.

The first method may be useful in specific situations for conversationalagents where several keywords or ideas are used throughout by the agentin a wide variety of contexts. Therefore, more precise information is tobe gathered to differentiate between them. The second method (thatrelies on indirect patterns) makes it possible to deal with intentambiguity with minimal demands on designer time.

Example Semantic Clustering Features

Semantic clustering may be performed to provide a variety offunctionality. For example, semantic clustering may be performed togroup a corpus of user utterances into zero or more semantic clusterswhere each cluster corresponds to utterances that pertain to the same orto similar topics. This similarity of utterances inside each cluster maybe used for a variety of purposes, further description of which may befound below. Furthermore, this similarity may be used as an input to ahuman reviewer, to a machine learning algorithm, to an A/B testingalgorithm to improve performance of the conversational agent, or to analerting system which may identify or react to new or existing userissues, among other applications.

Unidentified or Partially Identified Intent

A designer of the conversational agent 104 (also called reviewer) mayimprove the quality of a conversational agent 104 by examining the userutterances that are not matched to a direct intent pattern and/or thatget matched to indirect patterns exclusively. Review of these utterancesby the designer may indicate whether new intent patterns or new topicsare to be added to the agent's content. This review may be performed ina variety of ways, further discussion of which may be found in relationto the following sections.

Traditional ad-hoc approaches that selected random utterances orconversations were inefficient and could miss issues. By using semanticclustering, however, the quality of the conversational agent 104 may beincreased by:

-   -   Taking into account a statistically significant portion of the        utterances seen by the conversational agent.    -   Allowing reviewers to focus on high-impact issues first, without        using a system for categorization in advance.    -   Presenting reviewers with a sufficiently large set of sample        utterances that correspond to the same issue so that        high-quality patterns can be generated.    -   Ability to automatically suggest high-quality patterns to the        reviewer. Furthermore, the reviewer is given the possibility to        modify these patterns before adding them to the conversational        agent.    -   Ability to estimate the impact of the new patterns on future        conversations, before the patterns are added to the        conversational agent.

Erroneous Intent Identification

In some instances, user utterances may be matched to a wrong intent.Typically, this occurs because patterns that were previously insertedinto the conversational agent's configuration are too general or aresimply wrong. Traditional ad-hoc techniques that were developed toaddress these challenges would rely on reviews or testing of randomlyselected utterances or conversations, and detection of manifestations ofdisinterest, disapproval or hostility from the user. This ad-hocapproach suffers from lack of prioritization and amount of timerequired. Further, many users ask their question, receive an answer, andsimply close the conversational agent, thereby giving no indicationwhether the answer provided really answered their question.

Through use of semantic clustering described herein, however, a reviewermay spot erroneous intent identification by:

-   -   Focussing on the high impact topics first; and    -   Being able to examine just the outliers, i.e., user utterances        pertaining to a given topic that have the highest probability of        being wrongly identified.

Identification of Salient Topics in a Body of Utterances

Identification of the most salient topics in a body of utterances may beemployed in a variety of areas. For example, such identification may beconducted for marketing purposes, for identifying strong and weak pointsof a service, for identifying new topics that are being discussed byusers, for analyzing the evolution of topics over time, for creating anew conversational agent using content from pre-existing sources, and soon.

Additionally, the utterances can originate from text-based chats withthe conversational agent 104, text-based chats with live people (e.g.,live chat interactions or instant messaging), from emails, SMS, bloggingor micro-blogging sites, social networking sites, phone transcripts, orany other form of communication that may result in the production of abody of utterances that may be parsed into semantic graphs.

One such area that may employ the identification techniques is toidentify evolution of a topic profile of a communication channel overtime. In particular, topic evolution may be tracked in near-real timeand be used to assess the significance of topics as topics come intoprominence in order to react to the situation that caused the topics tobecome prominent.

Another such area is to compare two or more distinct utterance corporawith respect to their respective major topics, e.g., to provideidentification of common and distinct topics. In addition to thequalitative information about topics, quantitative information regardingthe occurrence frequency or the occurrence time of each topic may alsobe provided.

On the other hand, topic identification offers the possibility of usinganalytics data to improve a conversational agent. For example, ananalytics tool (such as a web analytics tool or BI tool) may producevarious metrics such as measures of conversation success based on thecombination of elementary criteria (e.g. whether the user thanked theagent at the end of the conversation, or whether the interactionresulted in a sale), and filter these results by time of the day or timeperiod. However, unless such measures can be viewed per topic, analyticsresults are generally not actionable for improving a conversation agent,because the results may be aggregated across a multitude ofconversations and topics without an indication of content areas that areto be improved.

By allowing a reviewer to look at conversation metrics aggregated percluster, semantic clustering makes it possible to identify topics havinga relatively higher priority for pattern-matching improvement. Thisidentification may be performed based on the values of the aggregatedmetrics and on various conversational agent-specific criteria.

Identifying the Topic of an Arbitrary Utterance in a Corpus

Once a set of semantic clusters for a corpus is available, attaching agiven utterance to a cluster can provide information about theutterance's topic, and more especially about the topic's importance.This would be otherwise difficult for a reviewer to do without reading arelatively large sample of the utterances in the corpus.

For instance, consider a conversational agent that helps users withselling their items online. If a reviewer looks at the utterance “Iwould like to sell a model car,” the reviewer have no direct way ofknowing how frequent this topic actually is; note this topic is verydifferent from the one denoted by utterances such as “I would like tosell a car” or “I would like to sell a Ford”. Cluster attachment canprovide this information in addition to the particular utterance atwhich the reviewer happens to be looking. In this particular example,cluster attachment may help the reviewer understand at a glance that “Iwould like to sell my model car” is not a frequent topic for thisconversational agent.

Since cluster sizes are a good indication of the prevalence of a topic,cluster attachment enables a reviewer to assess the seriousness offailure by the agent to correctly respond to a particular utterance.Without the ability to reliably carry out such assessment, contingentfeedback from reviewers and other interested parties are prone to leadto futile or even detrimental improvement efforts. The latter occur whenremedying an issue in a minor area may cause a regression in animportant area.

In addition to providing frequency information about the topicunderlying an utterance, cluster attachment also leads to topicidentification, which has useful applications for displaying utterancesin a UI and allowing an agent to respond helpfully to sentences whoseintent has not been identified by other means than topic identification.

Semantic Clustering of a Corpus of Utterances

Clustering in general may involve an array of techniques that use adistance metric in order to subdivide sets of objects into one or moregroups of closely related objects.

Semantic clustering is an approach that is based on the clustering ofsemantic graphs that are produced by a linguistic analysis process suchas the one previously described in the Matching User Input Utterances toUser Intents section, using one or more of the distance metricsdescribed below or elsewhere. The objects that are clustered in thiscontext are the semantic graphs produced by linguistic analysis. Theclustering of semantic graphs induces a clustering of the correspondingutterances that generated these graphs; thus use the term “semanticclustering” may refer to both clustering of semantic graphs andclustering of utterances.

Provided a suitable distance metric is used, semantic clustering amountsto grouping utterances by user intent or topic, even though users maydescribe the same user intent or topic in different utterances usingdifferent words and grammatical structures.

When applied to a corpus of user utterances that have failed to bematched to a specific direct and/or indirect intent (henceforth called“unmatched utterances”), semantic clustering enables reviewers to:

-   -   Focus their attention on one user intent or topic at a time        rather than one utterance at a time. A user intent or topic may        contain tens, hundreds, or even thousands of user utterances.    -   Use cluster sizes (i.e., the number of user utterances in each        cluster) to assess pervasiveness of a user intent, topic or        problem.    -   Generate or validate patterns through examination of a plurality        of examples of actual user utterances that are related to the        same topic.

In an implementation, a corpus having a size between 10,000 to 100,000unmatched user utterances is used for semantic clustering. However,fewer unmatched utterances may be used for cases where the volume ofdata is relatively small, and larger numbers of unmatched utterances maybe clustered for conversational agents (or other text corpora) that havea sufficient volume of conversations. The number of utterances may alsobe chosen depending on whether the semantic clustering is to be done ona near real-time basis.

Sentence Representation

Sentences and other user utterances are represented by their semanticgraphs, which may be a result of the parsing process described in theMatching User Input Utterances to User Intents section previously. Itshould be noted that this in itself may provide an initial level ofclustering. For example, in a corpus of 50,000 utterances, the samesemantic graph may be used to represent 10 to 20 different utteranceforms.

Proximity Metrics

Semantic clustering may be used to create groups of utterances that, fora human reviewer, are intuitively close to each other because they arerelated to the same or to similar topics. To quantify this intuitivenotion of semantic closeness, a number of proximity metrics may bedefined to compare two or more semantic graphs. For example, concept-setproximity and graph-intersection proximity may be used. Both typesinvolve taking a ratio of an aggregate specificity of semantic objectscommon to the two graphs to the aggregate specificity of each of thesemantic objects found in the two graphs. In other words, these metricsrepresent specificity of common concepts divided by overall specificity.

Specificity will be further discussed in the following section. However,generally, the less frequently a term occurs in a reference corpus, themore specific the term may be considered. Therefore, the inverse of aterm's frequency may be used as a reliable measure of specificity. Theaggregate specificity of a number of different concepts may be computedby taking the sum of their specificities.

Concept-Set Proximity Metric

The concept-set metric may be used to map each of the semantic graphs toa set of concepts and metaconcepts that it contains. The concepts arethe concept traits of the graph nodes. Metaconcepts are the values foundfor modal traits and “referent” traits (e.g., affirmative, negative,interrogative, interrogative-negative).

The concept-set proximity of two graphs g1 and g2 may be defined as theratio of the aggregate specificity of common concepts and metaconceptsto the aggregate specificity of each of the concepts and metaconceptsfound in g1 and g2.

Graph-Intersection Proximity Metric

In an implementation, the graph-intersection metric assigns a proximityto a pair of graphs g1 and g2 in the following way:

-   -   1. Using an intersection heuristic, find the most informative        graph that subsumes both a subgraph of g1 and a subgraph of g2,        where a graph's informativeness is directly related to the        precision of the traits it contains. Call this graph g1*g2.    -   2. Divide the aggregate specificity of g1*g2 by the average of        the aggregate specificities of g1 and g2.

Two example heuristics have been defined to carry out the intersectionstep 1, as detailed below in the “Intersection Heuristic 1” and“Intersection Heuristic 2” sections.

The intersection heuristics use a concept of “ontology distance” betweentwo concepts. The ontology distance between two concepts c1 and c2 isdefined as a pair (d, h), where d is the length of the path in theconcept hierarchy from c1 to c2 via their closest common ancestor, and his the larger of (the distance between c1 and the closest commonancestor) and (the distance between c2 and the closest common ancestor).

For example, the ontology distance between a concept and itself is (0,0). Between a concept and a parent concept, the ontology distance is (1,1), while between two sibling concepts, the ontology distance is (2, 1).

In addition, for the purpose of defining the intersection heuristics inthe following discussion, the following may hold true:

-   -   The pair (t, v), where t is a trait name and v a value,        represents a valuation for trait t.    -   A node in a semantic graph includes a set of trait valuations        and an identity.    -   The set of trait valuations in a node is a total function over        the set of available trait names.    -   Assigning in a node n the special value nil for trait t is        equivalent to saying that n does not bear trait t.    -   A graph node n subsumes two nodes c1 and c2 as closely as        possible if for all valuations (t, v) in n, the corresponding        valuations (t, u1) and (t, u2) in c1 and c2 are such that v        subsumes u1 and u2 as closely as possible.    -   For all trait values v, v subsumes v and nil as closely as        possible.    -   When trait values u1 and u2 are objects in a hierarchy (like,        for example, the ontology, or the one-level hierarchy of edge        labels, with root Attribute), value v subsumes u1 and u2 as        closely as possible if and only if v is the closest common        ancestor of u1 and u2.    -   When trait values u1 and u2 are not members of a hierarchy, the        values are set valued; and value v subsumes u1 and u2 as closely        as possible if and only if v is the union of u1 and u2.    -   Edge label 1 subsumes labels m1 and m2 if and only if m1, m2 and        1 are equal or 1 is Attribute.    -   Edge label 1 subsumes labels m1 and m2 as closely as possible if        1 subsumes m1 and m2 and either 1 is not Attribute or m1 is not        equal to m2.    -   The subsumption specificity of two trait values u1 and u2 and a        subsuming value v is a function of        -   an aggregate function of the specificities of u1, u2 and v,            viz. max, min or average,        -   in the case of a hierarchical trait (like ontology concept),            -   the ontology distance (d, h) between u1 and u2,            -   the number of hierarchy members at distance (d, h) from                v.        -   in the case of a set-valued trait,            -   the number of values in v (which equals the union of u1                and u2),            -   the number of values in the intersection of u1 and u2.

In an example implementation, the subsumption specificity of two traitvalues u1 and u2 and a subsuming value v has been defined as the productof:

-   -   the minimum of the specificities of u1, u2 and v, where the        specificity of a set value is the minimum of the specificities        of its members,    -   a discount factor equal to:        -   in the case of a concept trait, 0.5^(d), where (d, h) is the            ontology distance between u1 and u2,        -   in the case of a set-valued trait or of edge labels, the            value 1.

Intersection Heuristic 1

The following is an example definition of IntersectionHeuristic1(node1,node2, resultNode):

Let (dMax, hMax) be a greatest ontology distance to be considered. For h:= 0 to hMax, do  For d := h to dMax do   For each pair (c1, c2) ofchildren of node1 and node2 that have not   been marked as used    Ifthe concepts for c1 and c2 lie exactly at distance (d, h) from    eachother, then     Create a new node n that subsumes c1 and c2 as    closely as possible.     Create a function edge from resultNode ton, with a     label subsuming the functions of c1 and c2 as closely    as possible.     Associate with n its subsumption specificity.    Recursively call IntersectionHeuristic1(c1, c2, n).     Mark c1 andc2 as used.

The following is an example initial call to IntersectionHeuristic1:IntersectionHeuristic1(root1, root2, resultRoot), where root1 is theroot of g1, root2 is the node of g2 and resultRoot is a newly creatednode with concept trait Top (i.e., the most general concept in theconcept hierarchy).

The following is an example of use of IntersectionHeuristic1: AfterIntersectionHeuristic1 terminates, resultRoot is the root of g1*g2. Inorder to compute the aggregate specificity of g1*g2, sum the subsumptionspecificities associated with all the nodes of g1*g2.

Intersection Heuristic 2

The following is an example of construction of a map “ConceptSet:”

For each graph g in the list (g1, g2) containing the two graphs tointersect,  For each node n of graph g in inverse breadth-first order,  Set ConceptSet[n] to the set of concepts and metaconcepts occurring  in n and its incoming edge if it exists.   For each child c of n,   Set ConceptSet[n] to the union of ConceptSet[n] and    ConceptSet[c].

An example algorithm outline is now described as follows:

-   -   Construct the map ConceptSet.    -   Call IntersectionHeuristic2(root1, root2, resultRoot), where        root1 is the root of g1, root2 is the node of g2 and resultRoot        is a newly created node with just one trait, which is the        concept Top.

An example definition of IntersectionHeuristic2(node1, node2,resultNode) is now described as follows:

-   -   Compute a matrix M of proximities between each child of node1        and each child of node2. Each entry M[c1, c2] of this matrix        equals the concept-set proximity between c1 and c2, e.g.,:

$\frac{{specificity}\; \left( {{{ConceptSet}\; \left( {c\; 1} \right)}\bigcap{{ConceptSet}\; \left( {c\; 2} \right)}} \right)}{{specificity}\; \left( {{{ConceptSet}\; \left( {c\; 1} \right)}\bigcup{{ConceptSet}\left( {c\; 2} \right)}} \right)}$

-   -   where specificity(s) denotes the aggregate specificity of        concept set s.    -   Let minProx be a value such that, if M[c1, c2]<minProx, then any        node n subsuming c1 and c2 is considered to contain no useful        information.    -   Compute a list L of mutually disjoint pairs (c1, c2) sorted in        decreasing proximity order. The first pair (c1, c2) is the pair        maximizing M[c1, c2], the second pair (c3, c4) is such that        (c3≠c1 and c2≠c2 and c4≠c1 and c4≠c2) and M[c3,c4] is the pair        maximizing M[c3, c4] with values thus constrained, and similarly        for subsequent pairs. The length of the list L will thus be        equal to the smallest of (the number of children of node1) and        (the number of children of node2); every child of node1 or node2        will occur at most once in L.    -   For each pair (c1, c2) in L from highest to lowest proximity:

Create a new node n that subsumes c1 and c2 as closely as possible. Let1 be the edge label subsuming the semantic functions of c1 and c2 asclosely as possible. If (1 is not Attribute) or (M[c1, c2] > minProx),then  Create a function edge from resultNode to n, with label  subsumingthe functions of c1 and c2.  Associate with n its subsumptionspecificity.  Recursively call IntersectionHeuristic2(c1, c2, n).

Reliability of the Intersection Heuristics

Intersection heuristic 1 yields a maximally specific intersection exceptin cases where two very dissimilar nodes dominate very similar lists ofnodes. In so far as, in semantic graphs, the semantics of a nodedetermines the semantics of the nodes it can dominate, this problem doesnot occur frequently.

On the other hand, intersection heuristic 2 takes into account each ofthe concepts in sub-trees dominated by 2 nodes c1 and c2 prior topairing them and is therefore robust with respect to the risk of findingsimilar node lists under dissimilar nodes.

In terms of robustness, intersection heuristic 2 may be considered closeto the optimal intersection algorithm, which would rank pairs based ontheir graph-based proximities. But while the running time of the optimalalgorithm, even if implemented with dynamic programming, is exponentialin the product of the depth of the shallower graph and the largest childlist, heuristic 2 is linear in the number of graph nodes. Therefore,from a computational complexity point of view, heuristic 2 is suitablefor computing an intersection of a set (or corpus) of graphs rather thanjust two graphs, as described in the “Precision Feedback” section of thediscussion.

Specificity Metrics

Use of inverse frequency as a specificity metric generally provides asufficient approximation to measure the specificity of a concept, i.e.,its ability to characterize a specific topic. However, topic selectivitymay be measured in a more direct way, namely by comparing a unigramdistribution of concepts in a corpus with a conditional distribution ofterms in utterances containing the concept to measure. For example, aneutral concept like “interlocutor” typically occurs in a subcorpuswhose concept distribution does not essentially differ from thedistribution of terms in the whole corpus. Conversely, a specializedconcept like “spark plug” typically occurs in utterances forming anautomotive subcorpus, meaning that in this subcorpus automotive termswill be overrepresented and terms representative of other specializedtopics (e.g., cooking or finance) are underrepresented with respect tothe overall corpus. A variety of heuristics may be used to perform sucha comparison between distributions, examples of which includevector-space sine and the Kullback-Leibler divergence.

Use of Proximity Metrics

Concept-set proximity generally yields results that are less precisethan graph-intersection proximity because the former does not take intoaccount the shape of the graphs.

In one implementation, clustering may be based primarily on a conceptset-based proximity metric; in an alternate implementation, clusteringmay be based on a graph-proximity metric. However, two-levelhierarchical clustering, as described in the “Two-Level HierarchicalClustering” section, may make use of the same or different proximitymetrics for each level; for instance, in one implementation, thefirst-level clustering may use concept-set proximity, while the secondlevel may use graph proximity.

On the other hand, graph intersection may be used in its own right toproduce a graph to be used as a decision-tree pattern, as described inthe Pattern Generation section. In this context, intersection heuristic1 is primarily used. However, in an alternate implementation the resultsof both heuristics may be compared for added precision, as described inthe Precision Feedback section.

Quality Threshold Clustering

The semantic clustering algorithm is based on an algorithm named QualityThreshold (or QT) clustering. It can be outlined as follows:

Let SG be the set of semantic graphs corresponding to the userutterances to be clustered. Let QT be the chosen quality thresholdvalue. Let C be the set of generated clusters. Initially C is the emptyset. Repeat:  For each semantic graph s  

  SG, associate with s a candidate cluster  containing just s. LetCandidate(s) denote this candidate cluster.  For each semantic graph s1 

  SG,    For each semantic graph s2  

  SG,     If s1 != s2 and if the proximity between s1 and s2 is at or    above QT, add s2 to Candidate(s1). [Step A]   If each candidatecluster contains exactly 1 member, then Terminate.   Let Candidate(S) bethe largest candidate cluster.   Add Candidate(S) to C. [Step B]   Foreach semantic graph s  

  Candidate(S), remove s from SG.   Go to Repeat.

-   -   The result can now be found in C. SG will contain the set of        unclustered semantic graphs.

The value of QT may be determined through experimentation to strike agood balance between cluster homogeneity and low cluster fragmentation.Cluster fragmentation is defined as the scattering across severalclusters of utterances pertaining to the same topic. Cluster homogeneityis defined as the extent to which different utterances that have beenclustered together actually pertain to the same topic. For example, whenclusters are not sufficiently homogeneous, a smaller number of clustersmay be generated; however, the clusters may contain user utterances thatare not highly related. On the other hand, if there is a high level ofcluster fragmentation, a relatively larger number of clusters may begenerated that are not easily reviewable, since similar utterances maynot be grouped together in the same cluster.

A variety of proximity metrics may be used in the above algorithm,examples of which may be found in the “Proximity Metrics” section. Sincethese metrics yield the same value for pairs of semantic graphs (s1, s2)regardless of the exact membership of SG, the basic QT clusteringalgorithm described above can be optimized as follows:

Let SG be the set of semantic graphs corresponding to the userutterances to be clustered. Let QT be the chosen quality thresholdvalue. Let minClusterSize be a parameter of the algorithm denoting theminimum cluster size, such that minClusterSize ≧ 1. Let C be the set ofgenerated clusters. Initially C is the empty set. For each semanticgraph s  

  SG, associate with s a candidate cluster containing just s. LetCandidate(s) denote this candidate cluster. For each semantic graph s1  

  SG,  For each semantic graph s2  

  SG,   If s1 != s2 and if the proximity between s1 and s2 is at or  above QT, add s2 to Candidate(s1). [Step A] Repeat:  Let Candidate(S)be the largest candidate cluster. Let |Candidate(S)|  denote the numberof members in Candidate(S).  If |Candidate(S)| < minClusterSize thenTerminate.  Add Candidate(S) to C. [Step B]  For each semantic graph s  

  Candidate(S), remove s from SG and  from Candidate(s’) for all s’. Goto Repeat.

The following variations on the definition of cluster size providedifferent ways of identifying the largest cluster candidate.

-   -   The size of a cluster is the aggregate frequency of its members        in the set of utterances.    -   The size of a cluster is the number of unique lexically        normalized utterances (normalization is performed for case,        spacing, etc.).    -   The size of a cluster is the number of unique semantic        representations for its members.

In addition, in an alternate implementation the following variation maybe made on the threshold criterion in Step A above:

If (s1 !=s2) and (for every semantic graph sk belonging toCandidate(s1), the proximity between sk and s2 is at or above QT),

-   -   then add s2 to the Candidate(s1). [Step A′]        The above may be referred to as the diameter criterion. It is        opposed to the standard radius criterion (Step A) that        stipulates a maximum distance to one distinguished cluster        member.

In addition, in one implementation, the following variation (calledtransitive clustering) may be made to Step B:

[Begin Step B’] Set worklist to a copy of Candidate(S). While worklistis not empty, do  Remove an arbitrary semantic graph s1 from worklist. Let Candidate(s1) denote the cluster candidate for s1.  For eachsemantic graph s2 in Candidate(s1),  If s2 ∉ candidate(S) and theproximity between s2 and S is above  some specified constant QT2, then  Add s2 to candidate(S).   Add s2 to worklist. Add Candidate(S) to C.[End Step B’]The constant QT2 may be chosen to be a lower threshold than QT.Transitive clustering strategy may reduce cluster fragmentation withoutimpairing cluster homogeneity.

An implementation may use the radius criterion with transitiveclustering and a quality threshold QT=0.65. These parameters may beparticularly useful when clustering is combined with automatic patterngeneration, which is described in the next section.

Pattern Generation

Because clusters of unmatched utterances may include utterances forwhose intent no direct or indirect pattern has been defined, an additionto the semantic clustering algorithm may be made to add functionality toautomatically generate patterns for a cluster. The patterns can bepresented for inspection to a human reviewer (e.g., the designer of theconversational agent 104), who may then validate them and determine thedesired intent for these utterances before adding the patterns to theconversational agent. Alternatively or additionally, the agent designermay modify the patterns before adding them, may decide to discard themaltogether, and so on. In yet another embodiment, the associationbetween pattern and intent can be performed automatically, e.g., withoutuser intervention through execution of software such as machine learningor A/B testing.

The graph intersection heuristics described in the “IntersectionHeuristic 1” and “Intersection Heuristic 2” sections detail basicbuilding blocks for a pattern generation algorithm. For purposes of thefollowing discussion, it should be noted that by virtue of the way inwhich it is constructed, the intersection g1*g2 of two graphs g1 and g2,when considered as a pattern, matches both g1 and g2. In addition, g1*g2is likely to match other graphs that are similar to g1 and g2.

To ease the task of the agent designer, the pattern generation algorithmmay yield patterns in order of decreasing specificity. For example, itmay be easier to modify specific graphs, e.g., graphs with a multitudeof nodes and traits, by the designer so as to capture the desired intentwith the appropriate level of specificity. On the other hand, a patternthat is too generic is essentially useless because it can be easilyovertaken by more specific patterns or matched incorrectly to utterancesfor which no appropriate patterns exist. Therefore, a designer reviewinga cluster's patterns in decreasing specificity order may find a pointbeyond which it is not desirable to continue the review. Once that pointhas been reached, the agent designer may decide to discard thesubsequent suggestions.

The following outlines an algorithm for pattern generation, given asemantic cluster C:

For each semantic graph g1  

  C sorted by decreasing specificity  If g1 has not been marked asmatched   For each semantic graph g2  

  C sorted by decreasing   proximity to g1    If g2 has not been markedas matched     Let m be the set of semantic graphs in C     matched byg1*g2.     Record g1*g2 as a generated pattern.     Mark each semanticgraph of m as matched.

In an implementation, members of m are marked for exclusion from furtherintersections to avoid generating patterns that only includeinsignificant differences.

A further application of generating patterns for clusters is that thepattern projections form homogeneous sub-clusters, thereby providinguseful hierarchical clustering. In implementations, clustersindividually represent one or more closely related topics, whilesub-clusters may each focus on a single topic. Viewing instances ofclosely related topics (as identified by sub-clusters) close to eachother as part of a single cluster may be useful to assess missingcontent in the agent or risks of interaction between patternsidentifying similar intents.

Precision Feedback

Once a pattern has been suggested, the reviewer may choose between avariety of options:

-   -   Associate the suggested pattern with a specified intent, and add        the pattern to the configuration of the conversational agent.    -   Modify the pattern manually before performing the steps above. A        graphical user interface may be used by the reviewer to modify        the pattern manually.    -   Select one or more members of the projection m of the pattern        inside the cluster C that should not be matched. The selection        of these members may be done via a user interface. Once the        desired members have been excluded, a new pattern may be        computed by the system as described below, and the reviewer may        continue working on this new pattern.

If the reviewer decides to exclude semantic graphs, the followingapproach may be used to generate a new pattern. If the two semanticgraphs that have been intersected to generate the original pattern arestill in the reviewer's selection, the process stops without a patternbeing generated. If, however, one or both of the generating utteranceshave been excluded, the following algorithm may be launched to compute amore precise match than previously:

-   -   Let m′ be the target projection; m′ is obtained by removing the        excluded semantic graphs from m.    -   Compute the intersection g1*g2* . . . *gk of all semantic graphs        gi        m′. Compute the projection of the resulting pattern and display        it to the reviewer.

To compute the intersection of k graphs g₁*g₂* . . . *g_(k) using abinary intersection operation, any bracketing is valid, for instanceg₁*(g₂*( . . . * g_(k))) . . . ), provided the implementation of thebinary operation is associative. Since the intersection operations areheuristic approximations to the optimum, this is not guaranteed; butusing intersection heuristic 2, which is close to optimal, provides arelatively high probability that the results will bebracketing-invariant.

This approach to pattern re-computation (viz., an intersectionheuristic) may help to avoid reducing the precision of traits. Inparticular, unequal concepts may result in a closest common ancestor inthe generated pattern. This means that if, after taking the intersectionof the retained projection in its entirety, unwanted semantic graphs arestill matched, either the choice of utterances to retain and excludeturns out to be contradictory or the intersection heuristic has failedto optimally pair up nodes. The risk of the second case may be minimizedby applying intersection heuristic 2 rather than the slightly faster butless robust intersection heuristic 1, which is used for the initialmatch generation in an implementation.

Evaluation of Pattern Impact

In order to allow a designer to weigh the consequences of adding agenerated pattern as-is or after modifications, functionality may beimplemented to evaluate, based on an existing corpus of utterances, theimpact of adding a pattern to the conversational agent's 104 decisiontree 120. This impact is determined by the matching extent of thepattern, which will be described below.

An observation that supports this functionality is that the impact of apattern on future utterances may be estimated by evaluating the impactof the pattern on a corpus of past utterances (i.e., on the availablecorpus of utterances). This is true for patterns that reoccur in userutterances over time, which is the case for patterns that have beenobtained from semantic clustering.

Furthermore, adding a pattern that has no impact on past utterances onlymakes sense if the reviewer has foreknowledge of new utterances that arelikely to be made by the users of the agent in the future. Lacking suchforeknowledge, it is not likely that adding such a pattern will have animpact; for example, a pattern that is overly specific would have littleto no measurable impact on the past or future behavior of theconversational agent.

To estimate the matching extent of a pattern based on a corpus of pastutterances, the pattern can be simply matched against the semanticgraphs of these utterances. Estimating the matching extent providesagent reviewers with heuristics to predict whether the most optimalpatterns are being added to improve the agent's performance efficientlyand without adding unneeded patterns.

In one implementation, matching extent estimation can be performed forsuggested patterns. In an alternate implementation, matching extentestimation can be performed on either suggested patterns, suggestedpatterns that have been modified by the reviewer, or patterns that havebeen generated through other means (for instance, manually).

Matching Extent of a Pattern

The matching extent of a pattern p is the subset S of semantic graphs ofthe utterance corpus so that for every sεS:

-   -   If s was an unmatched utterance, p obtains a direct match with        s.    -   If s was an indirectly matched utterance that was matched by        another indirect pattern p′, p obtains a direct match with s.    -   If s was a matched utterance that was matched by another direct        pattern p′, p obtains a direct match with s and the matching        distance for p is less than the matching distance for p′.

In order to be able to compute S, the utterance corpus contains thematching distance for each matched utterance. Alternatively oradditionally, the identities of patterns involved in direct matches maybe stored together with each semantic graph in the corpus and thematching distance may be computed “on the fly.”

The matching extent is characterized quantitatively using the followingdefinition of a matching percentile:

-   -   Let |L| be the number of semantic graphs of utterances in the        utterance corpus L. Here we let |L| denote the cardinality of        set L.    -   The matching percentile of a pattern p is the percentage of        utterances in the utterance corpus belonging to the set L(p),        i.e.:

matching percentile=100×(|L(p)|/|L|)

The set L(p) may be constructed as follows:

-   -   Let ext(p) denote the matching extent of pattern p.    -   Initialize L(p)=ext(p).    -   Whenever q is a pattern in the decision tree 120 of the        conversational agent with matching extent ext(q) such that        |ext(q)|<|ext(p)|, then ext(q) is added to L(p).

For example, the pattern (or patterns) with the largest matching extenthas (or have) percentile 100%; on the other hand, the patterns with thesmallest matching extent have a matching percentile of 100×s/|L|, wheres is the smallest extent size for any pattern in the decision tree 120.

FIG. 9 illustrates an example 900 of visualization of a matchingpercentile of a pattern using a meter 902. The meter 902 illustratesmatching percentile coverage of a current pattern. A segment illustratedto the left in the meter 902 represents a relatively low matchingpercentile and a segment to the right in the meter 902 represents arelatively high matching percentile. If in the meter 902 the reading 904is in one of these segments, this is to be interpreted as a warning thatthe current pattern coverage is overly restrictive or too general,respectively.

Potential Matching Extent of a Pattern to be Added

The potential matching percentile of a prospective pattern p can beestimated as described in the section “Matching extent of a pattern”above. This matching percentile may be shown using appropriatevisualization such as the meter 902 in FIG. 9 for a designer to assessthe impact of adding the prospective pattern p to the decision tree 120of the conversational agent 104.

For increased precision, when computing the matching percentile of aprospective pattern p, the extents of existing patterns may berecomputed to take into account cases in which an utterance potentiallymatches p instead of the existing pattern p′ that it was matching withpreviously.

In addition, the potential matching extent of the prospective pattern pmay be presented to the reviewer by displaying a small subset ofpotentially matching utterances (for instance, on the order of 10). Thesubset includes utterances with the shortest matching distance to thenew pattern. A selectable control (e.g., via a user interface) may beused to allow this set to be expanded to show the whole matching extent,if desired by the reviewer.

Utterance Stealing

When an utterance that was matched to a pattern q in the log becomespotentially matched to a prospective pattern p, this may be referred toas “p stealing this utterance from q.” In addition, p may be said tosteal this utterance from the node in the decision-tree 120 to which qis attached.

Sometimes, this stealing is desirable, as in the case of a new, morespecific pattern stealing user utterances inappropriately matched to awrong answer. In other cases, however, a new pattern may steal userutterances that were correctly matched previously. Therefore, in animplementation the features described herein may promote human oversightto understand whether a proposed pattern would improve or worsen theagent's overall performance.

The graphical user interface presents the following information forreviewers:

-   -   The list of nodes in the decision-tree 120 that the prospective        pattern p is stealing from.    -   Associated with each node, the following information:        -   A list of the patterns q that matched the stolen utterances            in the log.        -   Associated with each pattern q, the following information:            -   the utterances stolen from the pattern q,            -   a meter showing the matching percentile of q.

Visualizing the Potential Impact of a Review Process

At the start of a review process that examines the results of semanticclustering, it is desirable to provide the reviewer with a quantitativeestimate of the impact that the review process may have on improving theconversational agent. For instance, if the review examines the resultsof clustering user utterances that have failed to be matched to specificintents with the goal of adding new patterns to the decision tree 120,it is desirable to provide an estimate of what the improvement of theconversational agent's matching performance may be after the reviewprocess has been completed.

In an implementation, the following information 1000 may be shown to thereviewer, an example of which is illustrated in FIG. 10:

-   -   The number of matched utterances 1004, with respect to the total        number of utterances in the corpus 1002 (both matched and        unmatched).    -   The number of unmatched utterances 1006 (i.e., utterances not        matching directly, including both utterances that the agent does        not understand and utterances that trigger reformulations), with        respect to the total number of utterances in the corpus 1002.    -   Inside the above, the number 1008 of utterances occurring in        semantic clusters of aggregate frequency of at least k.

This number or proportion 1008 provides a quantitative estimate of thepotential improvement of the matching performance of the conversationalagent that can be achieved during the current semantic clustering round.

The minimum aggregate frequency k is a parameter of the configuration.The aggregate frequency of a cluster is the total number of occurrencesin the corpus of the utterances it contains. In implementations,semantic clusters that are less frequent than k are not worked on by areviewer due to providing minimal leverage, although otherimplementations are also contemplated.

In an implementation example, when clustering corpora containingapproximately 10,000 unmatched utterances, a value of k=5 typicallyresults in approximately 200 clusters to review. In an alternateimplementation, when a reviewer is concerned primarily with the mostsalient issues, setting k to the low teens may provide an optimalcluster selection.

Erroneous Intent Identification

Cluster Center

The contents of a cluster may be epitomized by displaying an utterancecorresponding to the semantic graph having the least specificity in thecluster. The reason for this choice is that such an utterance primarilycontains information that played a role while building the cluster.Choosing an utterance with a richer semantic graph may run a risk ofdisplaying incidental information that is not representative of thecluster's topic.

In an alternative implementation, the cluster center may be defined as amost central utterance, where centrality is measured by the average ofproximities to each member of a cluster. In case there is more than onemost central utterance, the most frequent utterance among such mostcentral utterances is selected to represent the cluster's topic.

Tuning Clustering Criteria to the Specificity Level of an Agent'sPatterns

Clustering criteria includes the quality threshold, the thresholdcriterion (radius vs. diameter), a building method (e.g., transitive vs.intransitive), and a proximity metric.

Tuning semantic clustering includes the choosing of clustering criteriasuch that, in most cases, utterances matched by different patterns in aspecified agent will go to different clusters.

In practice, there are a variety of practices for defining graphpatterns in agents; so that it is necessary to tune clustering criteriato match the specificity level of a particular conversational agent.

Two-Level Hierarchical Clustering

In an implementation, two-level hierarchical clustering includesapplying a QT algorithm to a corpus of semantic graphs to obtainclusters and then applying the QT with more stringent clusteringcriteria on the set of semantic graphs in each cluster obtained in thefirst step to obtain subclusters.

Review Method for Erroneous Intent Identification

A variation on the semantic clustering technique described above may beapplied to a corpus representing a set of utterances that have beenassigned an intent by the agent, e.g., a set of matched utterances. Inthis case, semantic clustering attempts to classify by topic utterancesthat have already been assigned precise topics (namely, intents in thedecision tree 120) by the conversational agent.

Two cases may arise, either each member of a cluster is assigned thesame intent by the agent (convergent assignment) or members are assignedmultiple intents (divergent assignment). The terms convergent clusterand divergent cluster may also be used to describe these cases.

Divergent assignment may mean that a cluster spans several differentintents (heterogeneous cluster) and those intents have been correctlyidentified by the agent, in which case no corrective action isdesirable. However, provided the quality threshold of the clusteringprocess is tuned to the level of distinction the agent makes betweenintents, a majority of cases of divergence may arise when aheterogeneous cluster contains some utterances with incorrect intentassignment. Therefore, each case of divergent assignment may bepresented for review.

Errors in intent determination may result in convergent clusters with asingle missed assignment. Reviewing single convergent cluster forcorrectness may amount to reviewing one utterance representing anentirety of the cluster, namely the cluster center (due to homogeneityand convergence).

However, reviewing each convergent cluster could still prove tootime-consuming in a complex conversational agent. Accordingly, inimplementations the following review and semantic clustering scheme isimplemented on a corpus of matched utterances:

-   -   Clustering is performed hierarchically at two levels.        Sub-clusters are obtained using clustering criteria tuned to the        level of specificity of the agent's graph patterns.    -   Only clusters containing divergent sub-clusters are offered for        review. This means that both divergent and convergent        sub-clusters are offered for review.

This approach leaves clusters that contain convergent sub-clusters outof the review, as it is likely that such subclusters have the leastprobability of containing erroneous intent assignments. Conversely, itis likely that, if a subcluster has been misassigned to a wrong intent,then there is a chance that some other sub-cluster of the same clustermay be partially misassigned and thus form a divergent cluster.

When, in the course of the review, intent misassignments are discovered,a variety of corrective actions can be undertaken by the reviewer, whichinclude fixing or removing the pattern that mismatched, adding a morespecific pattern to the correct intent in the decision tree 120, inorder to allow this intent to capture the utterances in the subcluster,and so on.

Example Clustering Criteria

One or more implementations use concept-set proximity with a qualitythreshold QT=0.65, and a diameter criterion. On the other hand, oneimplementation of 2-level hierarchical clustering uses a diametercriterion with a quality threshold QT=0.65 at the upper level (clusterconstruction), and a diameter criterion with quality threshold QT=0.80at the lower level (subcluster construction).

Identifying Salient Topics in a Corpus of Utterances

Semantic clustering based on natural language parsing and the proximitymetrics outlined in the “Proximity Metrics” section (including 2-levelhierarchical clustering as described in the “Two-level HierarchicalClustering” section), may be used to feed clustering results to agraphical user interface. The graphical user interface may be employedby a reviewer to examine clusters, and subclusters if desirable, inorder to understand what are the most popular topics for a corpus ofutterances (e.g., user inputs performed via live chat, IM, SMS, email,social networking sites, blogging and micro-blogging services, etc.), aswell as to obtain a quantitative indication of the prevalence of thosetopics in the corpus. The following lists techniques that may beemployed to support this functionality.

Expandable Utterance Lists

A cluster can be represented by its center, as defined in the “ClusterCenter” section. Additionally, a user selectable (i.e., clickable) userinterface control associated with the cluster center may be used toexpand the cluster to display its content.

For relatively large clusters, the graphs of its members may be sortedby proximity to the center so as to expand the center by the k closestgraphs (where typically k=10); the graphical user interface may show therespective content through a specific command. Proximity to the centermay be computed using a variety of metrics, examples of which weredescribed in the Proximity Metrics section, e.g., concept-set proximity.

Cluster Identification Across Two or More Sets of Clusters

If multiple semantic clustering rounds are performed, e.g., on corporacorresponding to different time intervals, techniques may be employed tomatch clusters from the two sets that correspond to the same topic. Suchclusters may be referred to as “same-topic” clusters in the followingdiscussion. It should be noted that a simple comparison of clustermember utterances (or semantic graphs) may not be sufficient in someinstances to determine if two clusters relate to the same topic. This isbecause the actual utterances and semantic graphs making up a clustermay vary from one corpus to the next.

Once same-topic clusters are identified between two corpora, adetermination may then be made as to what clusters are present in themore recent corpus, and what clusters are absent from that corpus. Thismay correspond to the occurrence of new topics, or the disappearance ofold topics, respectively.

Centroid-Based Heuristic

While the clustering algorithm relies on the availability of a proximitymetric, and may not involve the definition of a vector space in which tolocate the objects to cluster, concept-set proximity provides theingredients for defining a vector space.

To map a semantic graph g to a vector, each concept may be considered asa dimension and the coordinates may be set as follows:

-   -   If concept c is in the concept set of g, the coordinate for        dimension c is set to the specificity of c.    -   If g does not contain concept c, the coordinate for dimension c        is 0.        With this definition, it is possible to define the centroid of a        cluster as the point whose coordinates are the averages of the        coordinates of each semantic graph in the cluster.

The distance between the centroids of two clusters C1 and C2 may becomputed and a decision made that C1 and C2 represent the same topic ifthis distance is below a specified threshold.

Center-Based Heuristic

The center of a cluster may be defined as its least specific member, anexample of which was previously discussed in the Cluster Center section.A decision may be made, for example, that two clusters C1 and C2represent the same topic if and only the set-based proximity of therespective centers is above a specified threshold.

In an implementation, the threshold is set between 0.95 and 1.0 althoughother implementations may also be considered. The center-based heuristicmay be used in place of the centroid-based heuristic insofar as (1) thecentroid has increased sensitivity to the presence of nonessentialconcepts than the center and (2) concept-set proximity is perceptiblymore accurate than Euclidean distance.

Cluster Identification in Binary Comparison of Cluster Sets

To compare two cluster sets C1 and C2, their intersections inter(C1),inter(C2) and inter(C1, C2) may be computed as follows.

inter(C1), inter(C2) and inter(C1, C2) are initially empty. For eachcluster c1  

  C1,  For each cluster c2  

  C2,   If proximity(center(c1), center(c2)) ≧ IdentificationThreshold,  then    Add c1 to inter(C1); add c2 to inter(C2).    Add the union ofc1 and c2 to inter(C1, C2).

The sets inter(C1) and inter(C2) contain same-topic clusters from C 1and C2, respectively, determined based on the proximity identificationcriterion (as described above). However, for the purpose of displayingcluster members, they may be used as follows, respectively:

-   -   The set of clusters specific to C1 is the set:        -   C1—inter(C1)    -   The set of clusters specific to C2 is the set:        -   C2—inter(C2)

If all same-topic clusters are to be displayed, the set of sharedclusters inter(C1, C2) may be shown. In an alternate implementation, ifit is desirable to show more recent clusters, inter(C2) may be usedinstead.

Applications and Methods

Clustering of a relatively large number of utterances may allowreviewers to identify prominent topics, based on the size of theresulting semantic clusters. This may have a variety of applicationssuch as to make sense of large volumes of utterances efficiently andautomatically. For example, an implementation may contain one or more ofthe following applications of semantic clustering: “Voice of theCustomer” analysis, display of “hottest topics” for the benefit ofsocial networking, online, or micro-blogging communities, identificationof the top issues on support channels or real-time user feeds such asfrom social networks or micro-blogging sites, and so on. A variety oftechniques may be employed to provide this analysis, an example of twoof which is described as follows.

Corpus Selection to Focus on Specific Topics

For example, a company may seek knowledge of “what is utmost on itscustomers' minds” and therefore filter a corpus of utterances(consisting of messages or product opinions) to retain those utterancesthat contain references to specific products or topics, prior toidentifying dominant topics in the retained corpus using semanticclustering.

Automated Topic Tracking

To track the appearance and disappearance of topics over time in acommunication channel, a technique may be employed to cluster corporabuilt during time windows that may be close and/or overlapping. Forinstance, an implementation may use corpora of utterances built eachday, by taking into consideration all utterances that have occurred overthe last 5 days.

For example, a customer support department may be interested in knowingthe top issues encountered by customers in real time so as toefficiently allot customer support operators. If this department offersa high-throughput automated chat, a one-hour sliding window may be usedto track the main topics on an hourly basis. Topic appearance anddisappearance may be brought to the attention of specialists by usingautomated topic tracking (i.e., without manual topic marking or apredetermined list of topics) the specialists may then decide whetherthese topics correspond to an underlying issue or to an issueresolution, respectively.

Automated topic tracking can be achieved by means of the approachdescribed in the section “Cluster identification in binary comparison ofcluster sets.” If C1 is the set of clusters from a previous time windowand C2 is the set of clusters from the current time window, thenC1—inter(C1) may represent outdated clusters, while C2—inter(C2) mayrepresent new clusters.

Automated topic tracking is also applicable across corpora that are notsuccessors in a time series. For example, a company may be interested incomparing the dominant topics in user utterances obtained throughdifferent channels, such as blog contents, blog comments, micro-bloggingsites, SMS, or conversations with humans and conversations withconversational agents, during a given time period. On the other hand, acompany with operations or subsidiaries in several countries may beinterested in identifying common topics across these operations fromcustomer-support logs. In this case, the relevant output of thealgorithm described in the section “Cluster identification in binarycomparison of cluster sets” will be inter(C1, C2), which yields commontopics.

Breaking Down Analytics Data by Topic

An analytics tool offers the possibility of associating otherquantitative data beside frequency data with utterances in a cluster.For instance, the results of semantic clustering could be joined againstthe metrics derived by an analytics system (such as a web analyticssolution or a business intelligence solution).

Furthermore, analytics data can be aggregated per cluster. For example,it could be of interest to a company to know which topics are most orleast conducive to commercial orders (in this case, checkout completionand/or shopping cart value could be the relevant analytics metrics thatare joined with the result of semantic clustering), or on the contrarycancelations (in which case shopping cart abandonment may be therelevant metric).

Some analytics measures, for example measures of conversation success,correlate with the quality of an agent's content and pattern matching.Accordingly, aggregating such measures per semantic cluster anddisplaying the results to a reviewer provides straightforward clues toareas the reviewer needs to act upon in order to improve aconversational agent.

Identifying the Topic of an Arbitrary Utterance in a Corpus

The following lists some supporting techniques that may be used toimplement the identifying features.

Diameter Proximity

The diameter proximity of an utterance s to a cluster C is defined asfollows:

DiameterProximity(s,C)=average proximity of s to each member of C

where proximity may be one of the proximity metrics that have beendefined previously.

Topic Frequency

The topic frequency of an utterance s with respect to a cluster C withsize |C| is defined as follows:

TopicFrequency(s,C)=DiameterProximity(s,C)*|C|

Cluster Attachment

Given a set of clusters S, an utterance s is said to be attached tocluster C

S if and only if C is the cluster that maximizes DiameterProximity(s,C′) for any C′

S. If several clusters satisfy this definition, the cluster C amongthese several clusters that maximizes TopicFrequency(s, C) may bedefined to be the attachment cluster.

Example Cluster Attachment Computation

Another technique for computing cluster attachment involves the samedefinitions as in the preceding sections, except that RadiusProximity,defined as follows, is substituted for DiameterProximity:

RadiusProximity(s,C)=proximity of s to the center of C

where the center of C is defined as in the Cluster Center section, i.e.as the cluster member with least specificity.

The diameter method may be used for analytical applications, as inassessing the relative importance of issues reported in theconversational agent 104, whereas the radius method may be used whencluster attachment is used in the conversational agent 104 to identifythe intent of a user utterance.

In an implementation, a hybrid approach is used by the conversationalagent 104. In this approach, diameter proximity is used, except forclusters whose size exceeds a certain threshold, e.g., 500.

Applications

The above techniques may be leveraged in a variety of differentapplications. For example, the importance of an individual case ofbad-quality response may be accessed. The ability to sort utterances byattachment frequency makes it possible to report an individual issue notas a request to remedy that particular issue; but as information on whattopics may be improved; or to decide that improvement is not desirableshould it be found that this particular utterance does not correspond toa (frequent) topic. This approach allows a prioritized approach to agentimprovement.

In another example, corpora may be displayed by topic. While nontrivialclusters (i.e. clusters of more than 1 utterance) may account for avarying proportion of a given corpus, cluster attachment may make itpossible to consider each single utterance in a corpus as a member of anenlarged cluster. This makes it possible to use summarization techniquesthat use the center of a cluster or the k most central utterances of anenlarged cluster to represent potentially hundreds or thousands ofsentences, thus enabling efficient browsing of a corpus. Such efficientbrowsing may be further facilitated by sorting enlarged clusters by thesum of the attachment frequencies of their members, thus giving mostprominence to the most popular topics.

In a further example, online exploitation of cluster attachment may beperformed. Determining the attachment cluster of a single sentence maybe performed with sufficient speed to be used as part of aconversational agent's matching process. In cases where a conversationalagent 104 cannot determine a specific intent for a user input,identifying its topic through cluster attachment can enable the agentto:

-   -   1. answer based on knowledge of the topic;    -   2. make it clear to the user that topic determination is an        inference the agent made and ask for confirmation before        answering on this topic; or    -   3. tell an end user that the agent does not yet know how to        handle the particular topic, and possibly present the user with        a search query or search result as a palliative measure.        The choice between options 1 and 2 is a matter of level of        confidence, which is determined by the attachment proximity of        the utterance. In an implementation, a proximity value of 0.33        is used as a cut-off point between low confidence and high        confidence.

CONCLUSION

Although the invention has been described in language specific tostructural features and/or methodological acts, it is to be understoodthat the invention defined in the appended claims is not necessarilylimited to the specific features or acts described. Rather, the specificfeatures and acts are disclosed as example forms of implementing theclaimed invention.

1. A method implemented by one or more computer processors, the methodcomprising: forming at least one intent graph pattern by using aplurality of user utterance; comparing the at least one intent graphpattern of the plurality of user utterances with a plurality of semanticgraph patterns; and determining a matching semantic graph pattern basedon the comparing if a sub graph of the matching graph pattern subsumesthe at least one intent graph pattern of the plurality of userutterances.
 2. The method as described in claim 1, further comprisingobtaining the plurality of user utterances from one or more users aspart of an interactive natural language dialog with a conversationagent.
 3. The method as described in claim 2, further comprising usingthe matching semantic graph pattern is used by the conversational agentto engage in a subsequent interactive natural language dialog with theone or more users.
 4. The method as described in claim 1, whereincomparing the at least one intent graph pattern of the plurality of userutterances with a plurality of semantic graph patterns further includesparsing semantic graph patterns of user utterances that are part ofsemantic clusters that are formed for like topics.
 5. The method asdescribed in claim 1, wherein forming an intent graph pattern of theplurality of user utterances further includes parsing conversation logsof the conversation agent.
 6. The method as described in claim 1,wherein forming an intent graph pattern of the plurality of userutterances further includes identifying an intersection of pairs ofsemantic graphs representing one or more of the plurality of userutterances.
 7. The method as described in claim 1, wherein the subgraphof the matching semantic graph subsumes the pattern if the matchingsemantic graph pattern is transformed into the intent graph pattern ofthe plurality of user utterances.
 8. The method as described in claim 7,wherein the matching semantic graph pattern include inter-connectednodes and edges and has traits defined therein, and wherein the methodfurther comprises transforming the matching semantic graph by at leastone of the following: deleting at least one node and at least oneincoming edge from the matching semantic graph pattern; deleting a traitfrom the matching semantic graph pattern; and replacing a value of atrait in the matching semantic graph pattern with another value thatsubsumes the replaced trait value.
 9. The method as described in claim1, further comprising: outputting the intent graph pattern of pluralityof user utterances in a user interface; and configuring the userinterface to receive one or more inputs to modify the intent graphpattern of the plurality of user utterances, wherein the one or moreinputs include a subset of the plurality of user utterances to be usedin the modifying of the intent graph pattern of the plurality of userutterances.)
 10. A computer program product comprising computer readableinstructions, stored on a non-transitory computer readable medium, thecomputer readable instructions, when executed by one or more computerprocessors, cause the one or more processors to: form at least oneintent graph pattern from one or more of a plurality of user utterancesreceived in a natural language dialog with an executing conversationagent; parse a plurality of semantic graph patterns to identify asemantic graph pattern that matches the at least one intent graphpattern of the plurality of user utterances; and determine, from theplurality of semantic graph patterns, a matching semantic graph patternif a subgraph of the matching graph pattern subsumes the intent graphpattern of the one or more of a plurality of utterances.
 11. Thecomputer program product as described in claim 10, further comprisingcomputer readable instructions to obtain the plurality of userutterances from one or more users as part of an interactive naturallanguage dialog with the conversation agent.
 12. The computer programproduct as described in claim 11, further comprising using the matchingsemantic graph pattern is used by the conversational agent to engage ina subsequent interactive natural language dialog with the one or moreusers.
 13. The computer program product as described in claim 10,wherein the computer readable instructions to parse further includecomputer readable instructions to compare the at least one intent graphpattern of the plurality of user utterances with a plurality of semanticgraph patterns by parsing semantic graph patterns of user utterancesthat are part of semantic clusters that are formed for like topics. 14.The computer program product as described in claim 10, wherein thecomputer readable instructions to form an intent graph pattern of theplurality of user utterances further include computer readableinstructions to parse conversation logs of the conversation agent. 15.The computer program product as described in claim 10, wherein thecomputer readable instructions to form an intent graph pattern of theplurality of user utterances further includes identifying anintersection of pairs of semantic graphs representing one or more of theplurality of user utterances.
 16. The computer program product asdescribed in claim 10, wherein the subgraph of the matching semanticgraph subsumes the pattern if the matching semantic graph pattern istransformed into the intent graph pattern of the plurality of userutterances.
 17. The computer program product as described in claim 16,wherein the matching semantic graph pattern include inter-connectednodes and edges and has traits defined therein, and wherein the methodfurther comprises computer readable instructions to transform thematching semantic graph by at least one of the following: deleting atleast one node and at least one incoming edge from the matching semanticgraph pattern; deleting a trait from the matching semantic graphpattern; and replacing a value of a trait in the matching semantic graphpattern with another value that subsumes the replaced trait value. 18.The computer program product as described in claim 10, furthercomprising computer readable instruction to: output the intent graphpattern of plurality of user utterances in a user interface; andconfigure the user interface to receive one or more inputs to modify theintent graph pattern of the plurality of user utterances, wherein theone or more inputs include a subset of the plurality of user utterancesto be used in the modifying of the intent graph pattern of the pluralityof user utterances.
 19. A data processing system, the system comprising:a conversation agent, executing on one or more computer processors, theconversation agent configured to facilitate forming at least one intentgraph pattern from one or more of a plurality of user utterancesreceived in a natural language dialog with one or more users; and aparser configured to parse a plurality of semantic graph patterns todetermine a semantic graph pattern that matches the at least one intentgraph pattern of the plurality of user utterances, a matching semanticgraph pattern being determined if a subgraph of the matching graphpattern subsumes the intent graph pattern of the one or more of aplurality of utterances.
 20. The data processing system as described inclaim 19, wherein the subgraph of the matching semantic graph subsumesthe pattern if the matching semantic graph pattern is transformed intothe intent graph pattern of the plurality of user utterances.